An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

Just about a week ago, it was announced that Blogger users may now mention either people or pages from Google+ in the same manner as within G+ itself. This would have been quite useful when I first promoted my  +Mayo Takeuchi Plus  page, which has now accumulated a good body of photographs. However, I cannot seem to cite myself, perhaps because I've linked this blog to my personal Google+ account and it would be self-serving? In the meantime, I've also added more G+ related widgets on this blog, including one that allows me to show thumbnails of people who have circled my personal account. Another button hopefully will encourage more people to circle my aforementioned Plus page. During my "day job" researching I'd also noticed that, although the follower/circle counts weren't up to date, that the PPC spots were also starting to make mention of sponsor pages on Google+. In an article " marriage of SEO and Social Media " (which likens this union

A little over fourteen months ago I'd posted the predecessor to this post , where I touched upon the concept of multitasking. Now, over three months since my last post, I find myself on vacation, and finally able (and willing) to return my attention to this blog. I recently read a discussion by friends that mentioned that "the days are long, but the years are short". I've certainly found this to be the case also, for the client-facing work I've been involved with since August of last year. There are advantages to being obsessive, focused, and absorbed in any activity, I believe, but there are also unavoidable detractors, such as needing to use a timer or other externalized tooling to ensure that less engrossing tasks involved in daily living are still accomplished as required. So, here are three tips to avoid ending up like that (altogether uncomfortably identifiable) XKCD character. 1. Learn to accurately estimate task duration and effort. As the XK

Courtesy of article from  getlisted.org , circa 2010 Google has enjoyed mainstream use  as a verb , in English and Japanese ("ググる"). Furthermore, if Wikipedia is to be believed, people "google" things in Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. However, a quick look at any of Google's portals shows that the company offers much, much more. Combining its various services with the perceived bias for presenting content with close allegations has led to my finding a recent article by Danny Sullivan . There he, in a nutshell, decries his company's having crossed an arbitrary line of what search engines are "expected" to do - objectively point to online content - and what it now (and increasingly) does: provide a biased subset of content that aligns with its business model. I'd found Mr. Sullivan's op/ed via an article posted to TechCrunch , which caught my eye due to its title: "Why we may no longer be able to trust Go

I use the macro feature liberally to create wallpaper-friendly photos Also known in more colloquial (and honest) parlance as a "shameless plug", I would greatly appreciate if everyone using Google+ who has enjoyed my nature photographs, rants about language, or who may have an interest in my views on Japanese culture, to add my new Google+ hosted "business" page  to their circles. Why, you may ask, should you do so? Well, several reasons come to mind. First, I have decided to begin populating this page, rather than use my personal G+ presence, to promote my "best of" photographs. Local foods and blurry candids may still be published to my Facebook timeline (as well as to pre-existing themed albums such as my pandas only album), but I believe that some of my pictures are actually good enough to use as desktop or mobile device wallpaper: hence the justification of this migration. Second, I have in past done some fast and loose freelance translation

Godaddy.com seems to have plenty of detractors With apologies for the unintentional hiatus I've returned to ramble, hopefully not too incoherently, about a topic to which I've given brief bursts of intensive thought over many years: domain names. For my day to day job, I consider things like how valuable the gTLD s (generic top level domain - such as .net, .info, .org, and the ccTLD values - ISO compliant two letter country codes) happen to be for my clients' web sites. Of course, since they've relaxed the rules on new gTLDs (at a price of $185K USD a pop, much to many people's chagrin, as ranted about by asmartbear - and his commenters - from a year ago), there will be even more to consider for future site analyses. In the context of maintaining (if intermittently) this blog, I'd read many articles and posts encouraging everyone to purchase their own domain, as the *.blogspot.com address "seems unprofessional" and could adversely affec

Disambiguating "Taj Mahal" - structure or music band? Courtesy of Google's own blog Otherwise known as semantic web, Google has announced its roll-out of ways to prompt the user to help disambiguate query terms ("strings", as in sequences of textual characters) to more specific concepts ("things"). Very catchy slogan. The Mashable article provides a basic overview of what this news means, and as I read this, my thoughts invariably turned to my former job in LanguageWare (which has been partially described over four non-contiguous blog posts last year, related to Language Identification ). When one is first exposed to linguistic data which has been amassed for the purpose of spell-check, it becomes quickly clear that in order to use this same word lists effect grammatical checks and even orthographical ones (e.g. whether a proper noun needs to be title-cased even when it doesn't commence a sentence), the part of speech is important. The afor

As illustrated in the xkcd comic above, Wikipedia has had an enormous impact on many web users. A contributing factor to their success in the more recent years, may be attributable to how visible their pages are in organic searches. Google has been long reputed to favour Wikipedia content in their SERPs. However, recently Search Engine Watch established that (albeit by a narrow margin), Bing is even more likely  than Google to return a Wikipedia page organically. Personally, I find it completely unsurprising that Wikipedia articles would dominate organic rankings: Their URLs are easy to hack: I often go directly to the topic I wish by crafting the URL, and they also have extensive redirects in place, allowing me to reach the desired content even if my guess wasn't the canonical term. They make an effort to police their content to minimize bias and conjecture. Many of its pages are updated frequently, again with the power of crowd-sourcing. The writing quality is also mon

Building something though people may not immediately attend? Karlskirche in Vienna by night Last Friday, Search Engine Journal transcribed part of Matt Cutts' talk which pre-announced changes to Googlebot that will address "overly optimized" content: What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now. First, it's my impression th

After winding down from what still feels novel but is actually BAU (business as usual) for me today, I read an article which includes this passage: In testing for the ads, Google mentioned clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the previous 2/3 line sitelinks. One would argue that is hardly surprising givent he[sic] real estate that these new ads take up, and that in itself presents more interesting scenarios to SEO’s[sic] who are already under pressure with many of the changes Google has made to its search results set. Further more[sic] these results bear many similarities to those of the sitelinks already in place within organic search results. More real estate to PPC which this undoubtedly will mean, should mean yet more traction for PPC results, and less visibility on organic results potentially resulting in the following scenario - More advertisers using PPC as organic visibility is being throttled - Competition within both PPC and SEO significantly increasing

Since joining a few weeks back, I've seen quite a few blog posts and articles (such as this one ) crop up about how best to use Pinterest , which I would succinctly describe as a visual social bookmarking service.  It's still in invitation-only mode (if you'd like an invitation, feel free to contact me for one), it allows for users to: Create collections of bookmarks ("boards"). Boards may be assigned a category, which others can then search for and browse through. Boards can be either solely editable by oneself, or contributed to by other users, whom one can specify by name. Boards may be "liked" via Facebook plugin. Add bookmarks as represented by either images and videos, either found anywhere online (publicly accessible), or via upload. At the time of pinning, one can use Facebook and/or Twitter to share out the pin. Comment on any pinned items. "Like" and "re-pin" items. Follow all of or a subset of other users' bo

If you haven't read about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Senate version, PIPA, today's blackouts (of prominent sites including Wikipedia) may have surprised you. Courtesy of the Oatmeal , which is also blacked out today, here's an animated graphic that humourously (and effectively) demonstrates why this legislation should be stopped: For a more serious (but concise) look, here's an infographic about SOPA . Finally, from today,  Forbes' interview with Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) about SOPA and why he opposes it.

Thanks to Google+, I first learned about a service called IFTTT ("if this then that").  They provide a very simple interface where the registered user can set up tasks. Each task consists of selecting a channel (such as Craigslist, Delicious, Instagram and many other social utilities), where a trigger event from said channel results in an action on a target channel. For instance, one can set up an email to be sent to one's account when the local forecast calls for snow. Or in my case, I've set up a task that tweets a customized message of thanks when I'm re-tweeted or followed. Possibly the most powerful channel that's available on IFTTT is the "Feed". Any RSS feed URL can be used as a trigger. This means that I can now consider leaving networkedblogs, on which I currently rely to syndicate new blog entry notices to Facebook and Twitter. I'd also like to review all my feed subscriptions, and see what else I'd like to automate. Thinking al